Mid 1980’s. A trip with upstate NY college friends down to New York City. We stopped in the Empire State Building not expecting to go up, but hey, it’s worth taking a flyer to see if the line is less than hours-long. Of course it wasn’t. We browsed the famous Art Deco lobby a bit when a friend said, “You know, everyone goes to the top of this thing, we should go to the bottom!”
We found a stairwell and made our way down. We got as far as the third sub-basement or so, when locked doors stopped us in our tracks.
So yes, we went to the bottom of the Empire State Building.
And I use that phrase whenever I go out-of-the-box, or go rogue, or eschew conventional thinking, and it’s what I mutter to myself when I write a lot of silly or outrageous things here, and in other places that you’ll never read. “That’s because I go to the bottom of the Empire State Building.”
Mid 1970’s. A summer visit, staying with our relatives in upstate NY, who happened to live just down the street from life-long family friends. The friends were a family of four, Mom and Dad and two daughters. The mom was my mom’s best friend, our dads got along great, and the girls were like sisters to me. When we all lived in the city, we lived in small walk-up apartment buildings right across the street from each other, and the younger daughter was in my grade in school. We often visited each other’s homes on Friday or Saturday nights, and we went bowling a lot, because our moms bowled together in a league. Our moms also spent a lot of time volunteering on a telephone help line- problems with addiction, suicide calls, pregnancy panic, you name it, the calls were real, and sometimes tough to handle. I seem to perhaps recall them hitting up some bingo nights as well.
While visiting these friends we mentioned that we were thinking of (finally) going to the top of the Empire State Building, which is something we had never done when we had lived in the city. We weren’t even thinking of the fact that this friend (the dad) was the chief engineer of a neighboring skyscraper, an insurance building, also a famous New York icon because of its distinctive and acclaimed architecture.
“You should come over to my building. We have a boardroom up at the top that is rarely used. It has a panoramic view of the city, and the only thing more beautiful than the view from the Empire State Building is a close-up view of the Empire State Building, high up, against the rest of the skyline. You can almost reach out and touch it. We host a ton of school field trips and VIP visitor sightseeing trips in that room, and I of course have permission and access to it. You also won’t have to wait hours for the elevator ride.”
We went there, and dammit if he wasn’t right. It was breathtaking, and I’ve never seen a better view of the city since. I don’t have any of the photos I took that day anymore, but it’s imprinted on my brain.
While the rest of our families remained for coffees and the view, the dad took me down for a mechanical tour of the building, down through every sub-basement. The electrical systems, the plumbing, the stories-high air conditioners, the water chillers, the heaters, the fire and emergency systems. It was huge, and a labyrinth. You never think of the literal city that exists under and throughout these skyscrapers, the very lifeblood of these buildings. The top is beautiful, but the bottom is where the action is.
The Empire State Building. You can almost reach out and touch it.
(If you were at the top of the gold-spired building towards the left-center, that is.)